Posts tagged ‘Rising Currents’

Thanksgiving is reportedly the biggest travel week of the year, and from what I experienced this year, I would have to agree. The night before Thanksgiving Penn Station was shut down due to switch problems, forcing many to travel on Thanksgiving Day. I managed to get a seat as they quickly filled up around me.

Posted by
Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

TheRising Currentsexhibition at MoMA closed on October 11, and as we have worked on the de-installation of the show in the intervening weeks, I have had a chance to reflect on the exhibition and the project as a whole. As I’ve noted here previously, the workshop and exhibition were precedent-setting in many ways—for myself as a curator, for MoMA as an institution, and, in some ways, for the New York architecture and landscape design community.

Rising Currents exhibition entrance.The exhibition's graphic design was made to appear similar to blueprints, the mode of graphic communication among architects and builders. Photo: Jason Mandella

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront is a unique exhibition for its subject matter, but also because of the process of putting together the exhibition. As graphic designers, it was heartwarming to have the full support of both the curator and the exhibition designer throughout the entire process. We were particularly gratified to be given the opportunity to take take our creativity beyond the title wall and into the individual displays—yeah!

Posted by
Lana Hum, Exhibition Designer/Production Manager, Department of Exhibition Design and Production

ARO team in the midst of installation. Photo: Ingrid Chou

As the first of five exhibitions in the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, the unprecedented nature of Rising Currents presented a number of firsts, including some novel moments in MoMA’s exhibition-making process: the first time producing an exhibition without a checklist of objects well in advance of opening; the first time exhibition content and exhibition design developed so closely in tandem; and the first time our modest, minimalist model platform held the weight, intellectual and actual, of five whole teams of architects, planners, ecologists, and their well-intentioned installers. (We really put that poor thing to the test, but I think everyone is the better for it).

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio's New Urban Ground transforms Lower Manhattan with an infrastructural ecology. Courtesy Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio

At one time, climate change could be thought of as a distant threat that could be diffused through prompt collective action. That time is past. Greenhouse gas emissions will not be reduced quickly enough to prevent significant changes to the composition of our atmosphere. Even as we hope for the best, we must prepare for the unpleasant eventualities that scientists expect will arise.

Posted by
Ben Prosky, Director of Special Events and External Affairs, GSAPP, Columbia University

Photo (and all subsequent photos) by Ben Prosky

“YES,” I replied, without delay, to the e-mail announcing MoMA and the AIA Center for Architecture’s last boat tour of the New York harbor in August. Having missed several tours earlier in the summer, I could not let this opportunity pass. Through Rising Currents, MoMA had not only invited architects and landscape designers into their galleries to present works responding to a real-world dilemma, but was now taking the public out of its galleries and into the areas examined as well.

Early this summer, I was asked by MoMA educator Laura Beiles to write a poem responding to the show Rising Currents for a Modern Poets reading that took place aboard the New York Water Taxi on June 29. When I first walked into the gallery space, I was struck by the measuring sticks painted on the walls, showing how much the water will rise in the next century.

The chosen place, Governors Island, as a granite island in the middle of New York Harbor, has an amazing context. This natural bay where the Hudson and East rivers meet and the moon drives the waters of the Atlantic through the Verrazano Narrows, causing the tides to swirl around the navel of the world, Manhattan, is without compare. Here is where generations came ashore to build America, fusing their collective cultures together to form a peerless metropolis. The water was the center. New York was built on the shores, so that its magnificent silhouette would be reflected by the waves. Tunnels and athletic bridges labor to connect all its boroughs. Like the Bosporus and the Bay at Rio de Janeiro, New York Harbor has a seemingly universal magic. God created a place, which every civilization would choose for its own. Every morning, Manhattan is born again out of briny fogs. With Ellis Island and Liberty Island, Governors Island has been elected to share this bay. Together they have witnessed an intense history, or have themselves become the symbols of it.

Tidal flooding at the edge of shops and homes in Can Tho, Vietnam (one of the Rockefeller Foundation ACCCRN cities). Photo courtesy Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio

At the opening of the Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA, curator Barry Bergdoll used the word “glocal” to describe the impact of this exhibition. At first I thought I misheard, but then I realized he meant that the exhibition was part of the growing global grassroots movement to address the impact of climate change with smart, local solutions.

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